Ichiro Suzuki, (born October 22, 1973, Kasugai, Japan), professional baseball player, the first nonpitcher to shift from Japanese professional baseball to the American major leagues.

Suzuki played baseball from an early age. Upon finishing high school, he was drafted by the Orix Blue Wave of the Japanese Pacific League (see alsoJapanese baseball leagues). He saw limited action during his first two seasons, because his manager disliked the young player’s unorthodox batting style—a sort of pendulum motion created by kicking the front foot back and then striding forward with the swing. In 1994 a new manager gave Suzuki a starting spot on the team and let him swing the way he liked. He responded in amazing fashion, lifting his batting average to .400 during the season and finishing at .385—the second best batting mark in the history of Japanese baseball. He collected 210 hits, a record for one season. Through 2000 he won seven consecutive Pacific League batting titles, posted a career average of .353, and led his team to two pennants. He was not a power hitter, but his speed and bat control were unmatched. He was also considered among the top outfielders, with the strongest, most accurate throwing arm in the league. Suzuki threw right-handed but batted left-handed.

By 2000 Suzuki had established himself as the best baseball player in Japan and had begun his quest for stardom in the United States. He spent two weeks in the Seattle Mariners’ 1999 spring training camp as part of a U.S.-Japan player exchange. A Japanese player in an American lineup was no longer quite the rarity it once had been; several Japanese pitchers, most notably Hideo Nomo and Hideki Irabu, had crossed the Pacific to play in the major leagues. Suzuki became the first nonpitcher to make the transition when he signed a three-year contract with the Mariners in November 2000. Because pitchers in the United States threw harder than their Japanese counterparts, some observers believed that Japanese hitters would struggle at the plate.

Suzuki made his major league debut with the Mariners on April 2, 2001. He answered his critics with a stellar season, capturing the American League (AL) Rookie of the Year award and a Gold Glove. His batting average in the 2001 regular season was .350, and it was .421 in the postseason games. In 2004 Suzuki broke George Sisler’s 84-year-old record for most hits in a single season, ending the year with 262 hits and a .372 batting average. Five years later, in 2009, he became the all-time leader in hits by a Japanese player, with 3,086 for his career in both Japan and the United States, and later in the year he recorded his 2,000th major league hit, reaching that plateau faster than any other player in history except Al Simmons. He collected more than 200 hits—and was named to the AL All-Star team—in each of his first 10 seasons with the Mariners. Not only did his 10 200-hit seasons tie Pete Rose’s all-time record, they also set the mark for most consecutive years in which a player reached the 200-hit plateau.

Suzuki’s level of play fell off in 2011. That season he failed to hit .300 and amass 200 hits for the first time in his tenure in the major leagues. He was batting a career-worst .261 during the 2012 campaign when the Mariners suddenly traded the fan favourite Suzuki to the New York Yankees in July of that year. In 2013 he became the third person in top-flight professional baseball history—after Pete Rose and Ty Cobb—to record 4,000 total career hits (counting both his Japanese and American production). In his two and a half seasons with the Yankees, he batted .281, and his total of 136 hits in 2013 was his best single-year hit total with New York. Suzuki signed with the Miami Marlins in January 2015.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.